22 January 2015

Today, the 42nd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, thousands will gather in Washington to partake in the March for Life, an annual demonstration against “the greatest human rights violation of our time.” The March is but one of countless expressions of the common understanding of Roe as a signal event in the formation of America’s political and cultural divide. As legal scholar Mary Ziegler argues in After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, though, by paying attention so exclusively to the Supreme Court we have lost a much richer story about the evolution of abortion politics. “Rather than remaining preoccupied by the Court’s actions,” she writes, “competing social movements had to navigate the realignment of both major political parties, the mobilization of the Religious Right and the New Right, the changing politics of population control and civil rights, and the popularization of neoliberalism.”

After Roe, to be published this spring, traces these forces through the decade following the Roe decision, informed by oral histories taken from over 100 of the activists and advocates who comprised those social movements.

An adapted excerpt from Ziegler’s Foreword appears below.

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The conventional wisdom holds that the Roe opinion provoked a major grassroots pro-life challenge to the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. For the abortion-rights movement, the story goes, Roe discouraged efforts to develop a broader and more equitable agenda that advanced all women’s interest in accessing contraception, child care, and health care and in avoiding sterilization abuse.

Historians, Supreme Court justices, and legal scholars with disparate normative views on abortion have united in their criticism of Roe’s broader societal impact: the opinion supposedly short-circuited a previously innovative dialogue between competing movements about what abortion rights ought to mean. Roe purportedly pushed American movement politics toward the “clash of absolutes” famously described by Laurence Tribe, as activists fought bitterly about the Equal Rights Amendment, contraception, and women’s role in the American polity. By focusing so heavily on the effect of the Supreme Court’s decision, however, scholars have exaggerated the importance of judicial intervention. In putting the Court at the center of the story, we have lost sight of equally important contributions made by the politicians, lobbyists, and grassroots activists who shaped the clash of absolutes Tribe discusses.

Events and activism since 1973 have transformed and multiplied the meanings of “Roe.” Opposing activists deployed Roe in ways calculated to change the course of abortion politics. Within the abortion-rights movement, feminists used Roe as a reminder that abortion was a women’s issue. At times, some movement members saw Roe as a symbol of the dangers of a single-issue agenda. In fundraising campaigns and efforts to mobilize new supporters, activists on opposing sides of the abortion wars reinterpreted the Roe decision in order to shape public consciousness of what the Court had said and whether its opinion deserved support.

21 October 2013

Earlier this month, New Atheist Sam Harris took to his blog to uphold the courageous Malala Yousafzai as both ally and object of his quest to save Muslims from Islam. Harris attempts to make of the internationally celebrated Pakistani activist an Islam-escapee in the mold of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, offering Malala’s work as the sort of truth-telling that “Islam’s apologists” must heed:

Malala is the best thing to come out of the Muslim world in a thousand years. She is an extraordinarily brave and eloquent girl who is doing what millions of Muslim men and women are too terrified to do—stand up to the misogyny of traditional Islam.

And yet, as Murtaza Hussain points out at Salon, Harris can’t possibly have respected Malala enough even to understand her own feelings on her culture and religion. Where Harris assumes Malala strives to be rescued from “traditional Islam,” Malala herself seems far more intent on rescuing Islam from groups like the Taliban, those whom Harris depicts as Islam’s most devout and representative.

Here’s Hussain:

Given her own words, Malala is ostensibly among the “Islam apologists” he is targeting; but this doesn’t come into play in Harris’ myopic worldview. Although Malala may claim to be a devout Muslim acting in accordance with Islam, this is merely an inconvenient detail that can be safely ignored… When you don’t even feel you have to listen to the voices of the people whose cause you’re championing, it’s a reasonable indication of the fact that this has less to do with them than with you.

Harris serves here as a particularly blatant example of a kind of crusading for Muslim women’s rights that anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod says became commonplace after 9/11. While Harris is fairly transparently using a young woman as a tool in his own ongoing war against Islam, the impulse noted by Abu-Lughod is just as likely to manifest as well-meaning—if ill-informed—concern expressed by ordinary Westerners for the status of women in the Arab world. For Abu-Lughod, author of Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, it’s critical that we ask where that impulse comes from, and what work it’s doing in the world:

This book seeks answers to the questions that presented themselves to me with such force after September 11, 2001, when popular concern about Muslim women’s rights took off. I worry about the ways that representations of Muslim women’s suffering and arguments about their lack of rights have been working politically and practically. I follow the concept of “Muslim women’s rights” as it travels through debates and documents, organizes women’s organizations and activism, and mediates lives in refugee camps and the halls of the United Nations. I try to uncover what this framework that describes distant women’s lives only in terms of rights, present or absent, hides from us about both everyday violence and forms of love. I ask what evaluating lives in terms of rights does for (and against) different kinds of women. Along the way, I uncover how key symbols of Muslim women’s cultural alienness—from the veil to the honor crime—are deployed in twenty-first-century political projects, and why these symbols grip us.

Abu-Lughod traces these representations and arguments as they appear in venues as disparate as UN reports, New York Times opinion columns, book-length philosophical inquiries, and a genre of “pulp nonfiction” that seems to flourish in airport bookstores. Her argument is not that Muslim women are in fact carefree, but that their lives are as diverse and complicated as all lives are, and that when we make facile and unfounded judgments about culture’s role in those complications we forestall consideration of any actually effective strategies for playing an appropriate role in their alleviation.

23 September 2013

As publishers, with our list forever in mind, there’s an involuntary reflex to filter all the day’s news through the books we’ve worked on. Sometimes that’s welcome; it’s nice to see it validated that the Press’s books are relevant to events in the world. Other times, as with Estelle Freedman’s Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation, not so much. From Todd Akin’s comments on “legitimate rape,” to congressional Republicans debating rape’s definition while attempting to tighten requirements for federal funding of abortions, to Dr. Phil’s noxious Twitter poll on the meaning of consent, to the dismissal of countless survivors and acts that don’t satisfy the classic definition of rape, one need barely be attuned to notice the ongoing cultural and political battles over the answer to what may seem a simple question: what is rape?

As Freedman shows, the question is hardly new. Today’s debates about sexual assault, and the role of race and class within these debates, have a long prehistory in the US. The definition of rape, Freedman demonstrates, has been central to sustaining gender and racial injustice—and contesting its definition has been central to activists’ pursuit of greater equality.

Beginning her story in the 18th century, when many women, especially enslaved and non-elite women, had little or no legal recourse when sexually assaulted, Freedman traces the work of suffragists, black activists, and their allies to redefine rape. By expanding the definition of sexual assault to include women of color and non-elite and sexually experienced women, by raising the age of consent, by combating street harassment, by agitating for the prosecution of coercive sex, and by fighting lynching, activists sought to achieve civic equality for women and for people of color.

As Freedman explains in the video below, across our whole national history of debating its definition, the politics of rape have always been bound to questions of power and justice.

09 August 2013

The
pornographic film Deep Throat,
released in 1972, was a cultural sensation whose star, “Linda Lovelace,” was
said to put a girl-next-door face on the sexual revolution. But the actual life
of Linda Boreman, as depicted in the new biopic Lovelace, was one of beatings, rape, and terror. Feminist legal
scholar Catharine MacKinnon, author of such works as Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and Only Words, represented Boreman after she came forward with her
story, and later, with Andrea Dworkin, pursued civil rights litigation as a
means to fight pornography. We asked MacKinnon about Boreman, Lovelace, and the potential impact of
the film.

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Q. You’ve noted that prior to the 1980 publication of Linda Lovelace’s Ordeal, you had no view of pornography
one way or the other. For those unfamiliar with her story, who was Linda Lovelace?

“Linda
Lovelace” was the fictional name of Linda Boreman, later Linda Marchiano, who
was forced into captivity and made to perform fellatio and other sex acts by
pimps, including organized crime, so that pornography, notably the notorious film Deep Throat, could be made of her. The film was instrumental in establishing
pornography as culturally legitimate in the 1970s. After her escape, Linda’s
valiant opposition to the sex industry included chronicling her abuse in Ordeal and extensive public testimony. Her revelations enabled a change in the
way pornography was debated legally and socially, shifting the focus from
morality to harm.

Q. This
film comes decades after the landmark pornography civil rights hearings at
which Marchiano testified, as documented in In
Harm’s Way. Can you remind us what was at stake in those hearings?

The
anti-pornography civil rights hearings collected in In Harm’s Way created a space for people victimized by pornography
to speak about what had been done to them in its making or through its use. Up to that point, the legal argument over
pornography had essentially only considered the freedom of speech issues.

The hearings
documented the inequality that is foundational to the industry: that the “speech”
of the pornographers is the use and abuse of the bodies of mainly women, who
were far from free and were not speaking for themselves. The consequences of
the distribution and use of the materials was shown to be equally silencing and
endangering to legions of women and children who are abused by its
consumers. Thus the sexual exploitation
of women and children in making pornography is mass-produced through its
consumers to become violation of other women and children.

The civil rights
ordinances the hearings debated were passed several times, then found to
violate the First Amendment on the theory that the more harm the materials do,
the more protected as speech they are–an incorrect, indeed reversed, view of First
Amendment law. The ordinances could
still be passed and found constitutional today.

06 May 2013

After a five-year study of a flagship Midwestern public university, sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton found that the social and academic infrastructure of the school seemed to prioritize a particular type of affluent, socially oriented student. A “party pathway”—built around an implicit agreement between the university and students to demand little of each other—was impossible to avoid, and for students who couldn’t or wouldn’t join the fun it served as a constant reminder of their place as outsiders. Armstrong and Hamilton’s Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality exposes the unmet obligations and misplaced priorities of public universities whose students leave college with so little to show for it. Below, the authors contrast the experience of thriving on the party pathway with the far more common experience of being failed by it.

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Naomi and Karen started college the same year at a mid-tier public university in the Midwest. They lived on the same residence hall floor and shared a taste for partying. Both majored in sports broadcasting. Neither performed well academically, earning GPAs below 3.0. Yet Naomi graduated in four years, moved to New York City, and quickly secured a desirable entry-level job in a media firm. Karen, on the other hand, had changed her major to education, transferred to a regional branch campus, and was struggling to graduate within six years.

In an era of skyrocketing tuition and concern over the value of college, these divergent outcomes matter. In Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, we trace a dormitory floor of fifty-three women, including Naomi and Karen, from the day they arrived on campus to a year after they were slated to graduate. The women were similar in many respects; however, they came from a wide range of social class backgrounds.

Based on this research we argue that how this university—and many other large state schools—organizes the college experience systematically disadvantages all but the affluent. The university supported a robust “party pathway”—a social and academic infrastructure with a powerful Greek system at its heart, and an array of easy majors on offer. Naomi—an out-of-state student whose father owned a successful business—was well served by the party pathway. Karen—a middle-class woman from in-state—was not.

Naomi and Karen—like one third of the incoming freshman class—were assigned to a “party dorm.” Little partying took place in the heavily-policed residence halls, but party dorms served as a pipeline into the under-aged party scene housed in the Greek system, which both women joined.

25 May 2012

When then-candidate Rick Santorum declared in February that John F. Kennedy’s 1960 comments on the role of people of faith in the public square made him want to “throw up,” he merely presaged a showdown to come. After this week’s announcement of a lawsuit brought by Catholic groups upset with the Obama administration, HUP Publicity Assistant Bridget Martin turned to a few books for context, and offers the post below.

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This week, 43 Catholic organizations including schools and hospitals filed lawsuits against the Obama administration in response to the federal mandate that birth control coverage be included in health care plans. Though the Obama administration proposed a compromise by which the responsibility for payment could be shifted from employers to the insurance companies, those bringing suit characterize the mandate as an assault on religious liberty. The lawsuits have set off a maelstrom of responses, unveiling the political, ethical, and social complexities embedded in the issue.

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece entitled “Why the Bishops Are Suing the U.S. Government,” Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon defends American bishops and their initiative to preserve the separation of Church and State. Glendon, whose HUP books include Abortion and Divorce in Western Law, argues that the health insurance mandate violates the Catholic Church’s constitutional liberty, ultimately demoting religion to a second-class right. She sees the debate not as an argument about contraception, but as a principle for preserving religious liberty, asserting, “The main goal of the mandate is not, as HHS claimed, to protect women’s health. It is rather a move to conscript religious organizations into a political agenda, forcing them to facilitate and fund services that violate their beliefs, within their own institutions.”

But what exactly did the founders intend when they included the separation of church and state clause in the US Constitution? In Religious Freedom and the Constitution, Christopher L. Eisgruber and Lawrence G. Sager caution us against imagining an impenetrable wall between church and state when we consider the ideal. Rather, they argue that while religious institutions and practitioners have the right to be free from governmental discrimination on account of religious beliefs, those religious beliefs do not on their own exempt institutions and practitioners from generally applicable laws. This interpretation sheds a different light on the relationship between church and state, especially as US bishops turn to the court in fear of being marginalized by the federal government.

Government influence is not the only social issue driving the contraception controversy. A day after Glendon’s piece was published, Maureen Dowd’s op-ed in the New York Times took an opposing stance. Dowd frankly rejects the position adopted by Glendon and others: “The church insists it’s an argument about religious freedom, not birth control. But, really it’s about birth control, and women’s lower caste in the church.”

Dowd’s argument is a window into the gender and power implications of this debate. As an institution dependent on male hierarchy, is the Church’s disapproval of contraception a tool to subordinate women? The struggles of women within the male power structure of the Church are chronicled in Jo Ann Kay McNamara’s Sisters in Arms, which traces the history of Catholic nuns in the Western world. McNamara shows that the earliest female converts were attracted to the Church by the proclamation of equality in the Kingdom of Heaven, a notion vastly different from the patriarchal societies of the Early Church. Yet since the establishment of female ministries, women have struggled to be recognized as equals in the church.

Garry Wills emphasized this subordination in an April post on the New York Review blog. Wills explains how the Vatican recently “stripped the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, representing most American nuns, of its powers of self-government, maintaining that its members have made statements that ‘disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.’” Outraged by this blatant reduction of power for women in the Church, Wills calls attention to the nuns’ unwavering commitment to the social Gospel, aiding those suffering regardless of political implications involved, as in their response to the AIDS crisis, their facilitation of the spiritual needs of gay people, and their activism in the civil rights movement.

Debates over the politics of religious freedom and gender inequality seem certain to reach a fever pitch in this election year. The Catholic Church is planning a national campaign for their cause, “Fortnight for Freedom,” to run from June 21st through the symbolically chosen July 4th. The initiative, intended to encourage prayer, education, and public action about religious freedom, was created in direct response to the perceived threat posed by the Obama administration. With the Church seemingly demonstrating the primacy of a respect for life in its political motivations, it will be interesting to watch the extent to which American Catholics embrace Mitt Romney, even in light of his Mormonism, which some may still find unsettling.

16 March 2012

Daniel T. Rodgers, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, has been named a winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize for Age of Fracture, his exposition of the late-20th century dissolution of the ideas that had previously served to shape Americans’ understanding of the world. The Bancroft is one of the most distinguished academic awards in the field of history, and, says the book’s editor, Joyce Seltzer, for Rodgers it was well-deserved:

The very first time I read Dan’s manuscript, I knew it was very special. He managed to brilliantly characterize the last three decades of intellectual discourse in the U.S. so as to enable me to see it in a new and revealing light. By mapping out major ideas about the market, race, gender, political obligations, and social welfare, and demonstrating the shift from collective to fragmented perspectives and outlooks, Dan makes the radical changes taking place in our way of thinking provocatively clear. I began to see the transformation he explored everywhere—in the arts, sciences, and in our social and political relations and expectations. Age of Fracture is a wake-up call to all of us that we must pull together again for the greater welfare and future of our community and nation.

Accurately and coherently characterizing an era is a challenging endeavor, especially when one’s period of inquiry is so recent. In his Prologue, Rodgers quotes Stuart Hall on the naming of ages: “What is important are the significant breaks—where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes.” Though the task is to focus on major ideological threads, rather than to catalogue an age’s every idea, one of the striking things about Age of Fracture is just how much ground Rodgers is able to cover in a book that comes in well under 400 pages.

Age of Fracture is certainly no pastiche, though, and it’s also not the sort of free associative cultural criticism that we’d associate with, say, Greil Marcus. Nevertheless, Rodgers makes his way from Jimmy Carter to Judith Butler, the Civil War to the Culture Wars, Game Theory to the Gay Rights Movement, Nietzsche to Noonan, Earl Warren to Alice Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Howard Stern. He covers so much ground, in fact, that we thought we’d just be blunt about it and offer up the Index. Give it a skim or a scour below.

Gilligan begins her article by recalling some of the first indications that her now-classic book had struck a chord:

In the course of editing In a Different Voice, in the days before computers, Harvard University Press sent out the manuscript to be re-typed. Some weeks later, I went to pick it up. The typist, a young woman, lived in a brown, three-decker house in a working-class neighborhood of Somerville. I waited while she retrieved the manuscript, which she was so taken with, she explained, that she had given it to her cousin to read. Standing on the porch, I registered my delight in the realization that the appeal of my book was wider than I had imagined. Some months after the book was published, the sales rep from the Press took me to lunch. As we waited for coffee, he asked the question that was clearly on his mind: Why is this book selling? I thought of the typist and her cousin who lived upstairs. People whose voices were dismissed felt heard.

Looking back now, it is perhaps easier to see that my title, In a Different Voice, calls for a new way of speaking, a change in the very terms of the conversation about ourselves and morality, women and men—about the human condition. In the old conversation, our ears were accustomed to hearing “He was an interesting talker; a man who had traveled all over the world and lived in half a dozen countries,” and “Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in.” I had borrowed these sentences from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (where they demonstrate the correct use of semi-colons and commas) to illustrate a point of view so widely assumed that for a long time we did not notice it. Once seen, the point of view shifted. In the newly illustrated 2008, fiftieth anniversary edition of The Elements of Style, the interesting talker has become “she” and Susan is pictured as a basset hound.

At the time I wrote In a Different Voice, I was aware of a problem in psychology that was in part a problem of method (the selection of boys and men only for studies of human development) and partly a problem of theory (a point of view from which men’s lives appeared interesting and women’s more or less of a mess). Clearly there was a problem, but in some ways the most interesting thing—at least to a psychologist’s eye—was that it had not been seen. Since I was among those who hadn’t seen it, despite the fact that I was teaching psychology, I asked: How could this have happened? In one sense, I was discovering the obvious.

In the article, titled “Looking Back to Look Forward: Revisiting In a Different Voice,” Gilligan presents a sense of the cultural and academic context from which the book sprang three decades ago. She reminds us that it was taken for granted at the time, and for a long time prior, that “the good woman cared for others: she listened to their voices and responded to their needs and concerns.” While noting that such caring is a good thing in itself, Gilligan’s work was about identifying the manner in which this “ethic of feminine goodness” underwrote the perceived normalcy of a focus on men in both academic research and everyday life, with women either overlooking or excusing their omission.

Whether or not FIFA’s burqa ban is rightly viewed as politically motivated, the situation is reminiscent of many other attempts to legislate physical markers of difference. And be they legal or cultural, efforts to enforce societal homogeneity have been on the rise in recent years. In The New Religious Intolerance, a book we’ll publish next month, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum brings her deeply humane perspective to bear on “the politics of fear in an anxious age.” She focuses on the fear driving episodes such as the controversy surrounding the proposed Muslim cultural center in Lower Manhattan, and the initial media inclination to blame Islamic extremists for the murder last year of 77 Norwegians.

Some of the comments were insightful, but most showed just what Socrates thought wrong with democracy in his time: haste, prideful boasting, a lack of careful examination, and an unwillingness to listen to the opposing position. I became even more convinced that Socrates was right: patient attention to argument makes democracy work better.

She went on to offer her perspective on why this historical moment has seen the emergence of what she considers to be new forms of religious intolerance:

People are justifiably insecure about many things: the global economy, jobs, safety in an era of terrorism. It is difficult to understand these large-scale problems, much less to fix them. It is far easier to convince oneself that the problem stems from the presence of new minority groups, and that some simple remedy, such as a ban on minarets or the burqa, can fix it.

As noted, FIFA has held that its burqa ban was a safety issue, seemingly freeing it from the taint of religious intolerance. As Nussbaum explains in the book, though, the problem with such safety (and, frequently, “security”) concerns is that they are applied inconsistently. In general, Nussbaum writes, “what inspires fear and mistrust in Europe and, to some extent, in the United States is not covering per se, but Muslim covering.”

At the meeting in which the new FIFA proposal was discussed, Jordan’s Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein, a member of the FIFA Executive Committee, reportedly made “an impassioned plea to the Board to allow the wearing of headscarves by female players.” The proposal is expected to be ratified at the Board’s Special Meeting in July, pending an accelerated review of health and safety issues, during which the use of Velcro-fastened headscarves will be tested. As FIFA Secretary General Jerome Valcke remarked, “If women cannot play because of headscarves then we at FIFA are very happy to authorise them so women around the world have access to football.”

24 February 2012

One of the most-nominated films for this year’s Academy Awards (ceremony this Sunday!) is The Help, directed by Tate Taylor and adapted for the screen by Taylor and Kathrynn Stockett, from the latter’s mega-selling novel of the same name. The film is up for four awards, including Best Picture. A brief synopsis of the plot (via IMDB):

An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the African-American maid's point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis.

So, The Help is about race, never an easy subject for Hollywood blockbusters, regardless of literary pedigree. The Help’s tangled layering of a white woman (Stockett) telling the story of a white woman telling the story of black women has been a fairly obvious target for commentary. As has been the Academy’s embrace of the film. No one seems to question the worthiness of the nominated performances by the film’s African American stars Viola Davis (Actress in a Leading Role) or Octavia Spencer (Actress in a Supporting Role). The profession of their characters, however, has not escaped notice. From a NYT opinion piece by Brent Staples:

The troubling thing is that the only two black actors in this year’s Oscar competition are cast as domestics, and would probably not have found meaty, starring roles in other films had they passed on “The Help.” This brings to mind the first black Oscar winner, Hattie McDaniel, who received the award in 1940 for her portrayal of the loyal maid in “Gone With the Wind.” When criticized for often playing a mammy on film, Ms. McDaniel famously said she would rather play a maid in the movies than be one.

During the 1960s, the era covered in The Help, legal segregation and economic inequalities limited black women's employment opportunities. Up to 90 per cent of working black women in the South labored as domestic servants in white homes. The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy—a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.

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The Harvard University Press Blog brings you books, ideas, and news from Harvard University Press. Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press has published such iconic works as Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s The Woman That Never Evolved.